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More "Pithy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Isis, the Theatres, the Forum, the Basilica, the Amphitheatre, which is in a perfect state of preservation, and more elliptical in form than any of those I have yet seen, and the School of Eloquence, where R** mounted the rostrum, and gave us an oration extempore, equally pithy, classical and comical. About sunset we got into the carriages, and ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... a voyage so vividly described, in more concentrated and pithy words? In eight verses you have a complete dramatic account of a tragedy at sea, from a passenger's point of view. It would be curious and interesting to learn what the owner thought, and said, when the prisoner suggested that he, ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... corn are stripped off when the grain is hard, and carried in carts to the barns, and placed in corn cribs adapted for the purpose. The grains are taken off the pithy cylinder on which they grow, by being rubbed or scraped on a piece of iron: in America a bayonet (a weapon called by the Yankees Uncle George's toasting fork) is invariably used for the purpose: the cylinder, now bared of its grain, is called the cobb. The ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 384, Saturday, August 8, 1829. • Various
... unsatisfactory by most of the leading abolitionists. Macaulay indeed argued with all his usual eloquence and skill in favor of the principle of gradual abolition, and it is hardly necessary to say that it was not in that speech he made use of the pithy sentence which we have already quoted. Buxton proposed an amendment to the resolution, an amendment in fact calling for immediate abolition, and the amendment was seconded by Daniel O'Connell. Buxton, however, ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... the applause that followed the short, pithy speech of the Bourgeois. The ladies blushed and praised, the gentlemen cheered and enjoyed in anticipation the renewal of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... strain of "To daunton me," must have been in the mind of the poet when he wrote this pithy lyric for ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... (1627-1704) was an eloquent preacher and historical writer, and an expert theological polemic of the liberal Catholic school. Of a very different tone is Rochefoucauld, whose Maxims, expressed in pithy language, seek to trace all virtuous action to self-seeking. The French fondness for epigram—for terse, paradoxical statement—is exemplified even in the best writers, as, for example, Blaise Pascal. La Bruyere (1645-1696), a genial philosopher, wrote in ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... first effort is as frequently converted into censure on the older offender. My arguments have, however, totally failed, and he remains obdurate and unmoved. Under these circumstances I have yielded; and as, happily for me, the short and pithy direction to the river Thames, in the Critic, "to keep between its banks," has been imitated by my friend, I find all that is required of me is to write my name upon the title and go in peace. Such, he informs me, is ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... Colonial Office, as the Hon. A. Lyttleton. And he, too, left us rather suddenly during this troublous year of 1913. In this year, too, South Africa was visited by a drought which for severity was pronounced to be unprecedented in the knowledge of all the old inhabitants. Remarks — some pithy, some ugly — were made upon the drought by Dutchmen. They all remembered how the God of their fathers used to send them nice soaking rains regularly each spring-time, and that it usually continued to nourish the plants and other of the country's vegetation ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... dashed to pieces with pikes and muskets, as matters of and pertaining to idolatry. The carving on the reading-desk was damaged, and two fair screens of beautiful sculptured oak had been destroyed, for the same pithy and conclusive reason. The high altar had been removed, and the gilded railing, which was once around it, was broken down and carried off. The effigies of several tombs were mutilated, and now ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... no lack of humor. Thus it hits the need of the average man and woman, and all others that reckon themselves above the average. The whole book is pervaded by strong and pure moral feeling, and the chapters are well dotted with pithy ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... he also set up a great gingerbread-colored carriage drawn by a pair of black Flanders mares with tails that swept the ground; and to commemorate the origin of his greatness he had for a crest a fullblown cabbage painted on the pannels, with the pithy motto Alles Kopf that is to say, ALL HEAD; meaning thereby that he had risen ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... satirical was Dorothy. The only sunshine of her life was on those precious Sunday afternoons, when always the tall gaunt figure might be seen ascending the desk in the nave of Saint Paul's, and, after the reading from Scripture, came a few pithy, fervent words, which Agnes treasured up as very gems. But by-and-by, another gleam of sunlight began to creep into ...
— For the Master's Sake - A Story of the Days of Queen Mary • Emily Sarah Holt
... of the Will, framed on these instructions, to Lord Byron, the solicitor accompanied some of the clauses with marginal queries, calling the attention of his noble client to points which he considered inexpedient or questionable; and as the short pithy answers to these suggestions are strongly characteristic of their writer, I shall here give one or two of the clauses in full, with the respective ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... words into sentences and paragraphs gives clearness and strength. To attain a clear and pithy style, it may be necessary to cut down, to rearrange, and to rewrite whole passages of an essay. Gibbon wrote his 'Memoirs' six times, and the first chapter of his 'History' three times. Beginners are always slow to prune or cast away any thought ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... of observation, he added a racy humor which those who knew him in his hours of relaxation and familiarity will not easily forget. His mind was stored with quaint and pithy phrases, and apt illustrations, which he not unfrequently seasoned with his native idiom, the broad Barnsley dialect. His north-country pronunciation, indeed, never entirely forsook him; and the singular graft of German which he made upon it during his residence abroad, caused ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... no pains to be certain that it was his best. Perhaps there is a slight falling off in 'Following the Equator'; a trace of fatigue, of weariness, of disenchantment. But the last book of travels has passages as broadly humorous as any of the first; and it proves the author's possession of a pithy shrewdness not to be suspected from a perusal of its earliest predecessor. The first book was the work of a young fellow rejoicing in his own fun and resolved to make his readers laugh with him or at him; the latest book is the work of an older man, who has found that life ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... last two years had pleased him well: he was connected with a certain large literary society which gave his legal wits plenty of scope. In his leisure hours he wrote moderately well-expressed papers on all sorts of social subjects with a pithy raciness and command of language that excited a good ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... grow wiser in certain points where he never intended they should."[32] The monster-mongers is a terrible thrust, when we remember some of the comedies and heroic plays which Dryden ushered in this fashion. In the dedication of the "Annus" to the city of London is one of those pithy sentences of which Dryden is ever afterwards so full, and which he lets fall with a carelessness that seems always to deepen the meaning: "I have heard, indeed, of some virtuous persons who have ended unfortunately, but never of any virtuous nation; Providence is engaged too deeply when the ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... several of his aides-de-camp. As the foe came near, the artillery ceased, the close fight began, and several regiments at once poured in their fire: both sides kept their ground, and hundreds fell at every discharge of musketry. The duke now, in the pithy and familiar language of the soldier, cried out to the Scots, "Ninety-second, you ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... for proceedings to be at their height at midnight. I was at such a gathering in the lower part of the State, where Jack Agery, a noted plantation orator, was holding forth, denouncing the Democracy and rallying the faithful. He was a man of great natural ability and bristling with pithy anecdote. From a rude platform half a dozen candles flickered a weird and unsteady glare. Agery as a spellbinder was at his best, when a hushed whisper, growing into a general alarm, announced that members of the Ku Klux, an organization noted for the ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... "Household Words," and subsequently on "All the Year Round," so that little time was left him for humorous composition—though he certainly found leisure to issue "The Family Joe Miller." When he was in Edinburgh he married Robert Chambers' sister—a lady possessed of true Scottish wit, some of whose pithy remarks are still remembered, such as "The ladies who agitate for women's rights ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... compilation of pithy quotations, selected from a great variety of sources, and alphabetically arranged according to the sentiment. In addition to all the popular quotations in current use, it contains many rare bits of prose and verse not generally ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... Newspapers proper appeared as early as 1615 in Germany. But these rhymed gazettes were very numerous. They were more or less bulky pamphlets, with pithy sarcastic programmes for titles, and sometimes a wood or copper cut prefixed. A few of them were of Catholic origin, and one, entitled Post-Bole, (The Express,) is quite as good as anything issued by the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... soldiers who should despise toil and danger and prefer death to military dishonor. Reading and writing were untaught, and the art of rhetoric was despised. Spartan brevity was a proverb, whence our word laconic (from Laconia), implying a concise and pithy mode of expression. Boys were taught to respond in the fewest words possible. At the public tables they were not permitted to speak until questioned: they sat "silent as statues." As Plutarch puts ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... volumes of small size indeed, but of remarkable vigour and merit. As soon as any notable attack was made on the Catholics, an answer was brought out in a wonderfully short time, and these answers were pithy, vigorous, and pointed, in no ordinary degree. When one remembers how much co-operation is needed to bring out even the slightest volume, one is truly astonished at the feat of bringing out so many and such good ones, while the hourly fear of capture, torture, ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... Some pithy remarks on the habitual English attitude toward music may be found in the history of Stanford and ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... not time and patience to wade through a long story will find here many pithy and sprightly tales, each sharply hitting some social absurdity or social vice. We recommend the book heartily after having read the three chapters on 'Taking a Newspaper.' If all the rest are as sensible and interesting as these, and doubtless they are, the ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... Henry, there, will translate it And put it in verse and print as he promised To do when it happened. Will he do it? I doubt. He dislikes to dabble with rhyme and with measure. Says that good honest prose is the best and the sweetest If the words be well chosen, short, Saxon, and pithy. And that making of verse is the business of women, Of green boys at school, and of lovers when spooning. But try him. It may be he will. For a lesson Is in it, and that makes it worth telling. The woods have their secrets and sorrows ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... as timber, but affording an inexhaustible supply of firewood. Besides the trees I have mentioned, there is the xanthorea, or grass-tree, a plant which cannot be intelligibly described to those who have never seen it. The stem consists of a tough pithy substance, round which the leaves are formed. These, long and tapering like the rush, are four-sided, and extremely brittle; the base from which they shoot is broad and flat, about the size of a thumb-nail, ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... as a whole, I know not any poetic epistles to be compared with them. They are just the letters in which one friend might unbosom himself to another without the least artifice or disguise. And the broad Doric is so pithy, so powerful, so aptly fitted to the thought, that not even Horace himself has surpassed it in "curious felicity." Often, when harvests were failing and the world going against him, he found his solace in pouring forth in rhyme his feelings to some trusted friend. As he says ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... him happily to infringe the resolution, and then it became, "I will always, if possible, hear Daniel Wilson." Sentences of his were very memorable; for instance, "Nineteen- twentieths of sanctification consist in holy tempers," and, besides exhibiting a pithy force of language, his sermons were prepared with infinite care and labour. When at St. John's, where he had no parochial charge, he selected his text on Monday and carried it about with him, so to speak, all the week, chewing the cud of it as it were, looking it up in every authority, ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... looked at him with some surprise, being uncertain as to the person referred to by this pithy remark, and Flora glanced at him with a look ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... and out everywhere, yet these were only navigable at high tide, and at all other times were impassable marshes. There were but few posts where the enemy were within rifle range, and their occasional attacks at those points were soon stopped by our enforcement of a pithy order from General Hunter, "Give them as good as they send." So that, with every opportunity for being kept on the alert, there was small prospect of serious danger; and all promised an easy life, with only enough of care to make it pleasant. The picket station was therefore always ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... should become a disciple of the pithy, everyday conversationalist and of the rough-and-ready master of harangue as well as of the practitioner of precise and scrupulous discourse. Many a speaker or writer has thwarted himself by trying to ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... these Meditations, and are fain to confess that we admire them very much. They are short, succinct, pithy, always to the point, ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... bracted racemes 2 to 8 in. long. Calyx of 4 or 5 rounded persistent sepals, simulating petals; no corolla; 10 short stamens; 10-celled ovary, green, conspicuous; styles curved. Stem: Stout, pithy, erect, branching, reddening toward the end of summer, 4 to 10 ft. tall, from a large, perennial, poisonous root. Leaves: Alternate, petioled, oblong to lance-shaped, tapering at both ends, 8 to 12 in. long. Fruit: Very juicy, dark purplish berries, hanging in long clusters ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... he had never sat more than one hour at meat in his own house, and that he never overslept the sunrise. After dinner he would converse with his friends, using commonly his native dialect of Bergamo, and entertaining the company now with stories of adventure, and now with pithy sayings. In another essential point he resembled his illustrious contemporary, the Duke of Urbino; for he was sincerely pious in an age which, however it preserved the decencies of ceremonial religion, was profoundly corrupt at heart. His principal lordships in the Bergamasque territory owed ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... of its fine-flavoured, sound fruit. Perhaps the fruit is especially large, too. Size of fruit, however, does not denote fine fruit. I once had an apple that weighed a pound. It was a beauty, fair to look upon. But what a tasteless, pithy piece of fruit it was. Appearances in fruit are often deceitful. The scions were to be of the last year's growth with two or more buds. The shoots should be clean, healthy and vigorous. You must transmit no disease along with the scions. These may be cut off in January ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... furred and feathered life appeared to be going on there between the round-headed cactus, with its cruel fishhook thorns, and the warning, blood-red blossoms that dripped from the ocatilla. Little frisk-tailed things ran up and down the spiney shrubs, and a woodpecker, who had made his nest in its pithy stalk, peered at them from a ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... favourite. As a speaker, Colonel Burr was calm and persuasive. He was most remarkable for the power which he possessed of condensation. His appeals, whether to a court or a jury, were sententious and lucid. His speeches, generally, were argumentative, short, and pithy. No flights of fancy, no metaphors, no parade of impassioned sentences, are to be found in them. When employed on the same side of a cause with General Hamilton, it was his uniform practice to permit that gentleman to select his own place in ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... but it is scarcely the honest man's maxim. Our country, after all, cannot have nearer claims upon us, than our parents for instance; and who can claim a moral right to sustain even his own father, in error, injustice, or crime? No, no—I hate your pithy sayings; they commonly mean nothing that is substantially ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... lumber yard flew high night and day. He bought newspapers galore and read from them aloud at meals, in the evenings, and before breakfast. Issachar, as usual, talked much and said little. Laban Keeler's comments were pithy and dryly pointed. ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... frill, the gills are free from the stem, they never grow down against it, but usually there is a small channel all around the top of the stem, the spores are brown-black, or deep purple black and the stem is solid or slightly pithy. It is said if salt is sprinkled on the gills and they become yellow the mushroom is poisonous, if black, they are wholesome. Sweet oil is ...
— Vaughan's Vegetable Cook Book (4th edition) - How to Cook and Use Rarer Vegetables and Herbs • Anonymous
... following day, and pressed them strongly to remain with him for the day, which, however, not all his solicitations nor importunities could induce them to accede to. After some trifling conversation, and a long and pithy harangue from a Fellata, they took their leave of him and his people, and instantly made their way back to the water side, where they waited in the grass hut for the appearance of the canoe men, with whom the chief had promised to supply them. After a considerable delay, a man for ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... elect to permit a humble admirer to propose a question. As our king, we put our lives and fortunes in your hands. If, therefore, the Eagle, the Vulture, and the Kite, should make a descent upon us, what means would you take for our defense?" This pithy question opened the eyes of the Birds to the weakness of their choice ...
— Aesop's Fables - A New Revised Version From Original Sources • Aesop
... The pithy conciseness of the brackish tongue renders it eminently useful on duty. In some of their sea-phrases the French, our great rivals, use a heap of words more than we are wont to do. An instance is given—supposing a ship of the former met with one of ours, and they should desire to ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... left my mother to her interview with Hilda, and betaken myself to the club. It was too early even to hope for a sight of Lucy. There were a number of men in the reading-room discussing the morning leader in that fair-minded and pithy sheet, the Charleston News and Courier, and one of these, eyeing me with a quizzical expression, said: "You look as if you ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... opinion recommends for bedtime reading short stories, volumes of pithy anecdote, swift and sparkling stuff that may keep one awake for a space, yet will advantage all the sweeter slumber in the end. Even ghost stories and harrowing matter are maintained seasonable ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... or between different salutary acts, but indiscriminately postulate for all the illuminating grace of the intellect and the strengthening grace of the will. It follows that to perform salutary acts the justified no less than the unjustified need actual grace. Our Saviour's pithy saying: "Without me you can do nothing,"(348) was not addressed to unbelievers or sinners, but to His Apostles, who were in the state of ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... to appear, or neglected one thing that she was asked to do, or showed the smallest feeling on the occasion beyond a general sense of dissatisfaction at all things connected with the sea. But of all our sufferers none equalled my poor cousin. Not a word was to be got out of her, but short pithy anathemas against everybody that came near her, everybody that spoke to her, every lurch the ship made, every noise overhead; an expression of pity caused an explosion of wrath, a hope that she was better a wish that she was dead, and an offer of assistance a command ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... during the whole time of my remaining with him. He saw me reject this, and select that; cry "pish" upon one article, and "bravo" upon another—with the same settled complacency of countenance. His responses were short and pithy, and I must add, pleasant: for, having entirely given up all hopes of securing any thing in the shape of a good picture, a good bust, or a genuine illumination from a rich old MS., I confined myself strictly to printed books—and obtained some very rare, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... on the intendant for the wages due to him, and without a word waved his hand towards the door. Remonstrance and entreaty, or the assurance that it was a first fault, were alike in vain; a stare, a shrug, and just possibly the pithy injunction, "Go!" was the utmost they ever elicited from the maitre d'hotel; and as their wages were high and always paid to the day, a practice by no means common in great households in those times, the cases of delinquency were ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... trahit mifas rutis oho, trahis mutis Humo astra hosti oho, fum Charitas. If the pertingent Reader still craves more evidence of the extent of Hariot's friendships, and the universality of his acquirements, let him read the following pithy, quaint, and beautiful tribute paid to him by blind Old Homer's Chapman in 1616. It is found in the Preface to the Reader in the first complete edition of Homer'sworks translated by George Chapman, ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... as the divine standard of right living and right thinking, at the same time they found in the sacred volume the treasures of a most original and noble literature unrolled before them; stirring history and romantic legend, cosmical theories and priestly injunctions, profound metaphysics and pithy proverbs, psalms of unrivalled grandeur and pastorals of exquisite loveliness, parables fraught with solemn meaning, the mournful wisdom of the preacher, the exultant faith of the apostle, the matchless eloquence of Job and Isaiah, ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... true of itself, but the fruit-like acid tomato flavor which most people value is found chiefly in the pulp, and the fruit which has not a due proportion of pulp and flesh seems to be insipid and tasteless. Again, the division into many small cells is often connected with a large and pithy placenta and unevenness in maturity and coloring, which faults often more than overbalance any advantage from small cells and thick flesh. The size and character of the placenta ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... Indians. The leaf-stalk, when dried, is light and elastic, like the quill of a bird—owing to the thin, hard, outer covering and soft internal pith. Out of the outer rind, when split off, the Indian makes baskets and window-blinds. The pithy part is separated into laths, about half an inch thick, with which window-shutters, boxes, bird-cages, partitions, and even ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... that. Hickory is not hard to graft in the field. I think if you set 10 you get 9 to grow. For scions I go back on two-year wood and oftentimes on three-year wood where there are buds. I don't have trouble at all. With pecans, you have a little more difficulty, because the wood is more pithy inside and doesn't grow ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... conjecture a reason for this, till he happened to take off his hat and lay it beside him. As soon as he noticed the button, he rose and said, "Friends, if religion consists in a button, I wouldn't give a button for it." Having delivered this short and pithy sermon, he seated himself, and resumed the offending ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... silent. Then with averted face she spoke again. "My uncle commands me, with many astute saws and pithy sayings, to wed Monsieur de Puysange. I have not skill to combat him. Many times he has proven it my duty, but he is quick in argument and proves what he will; and I do not think it is my duty. It appears to me a matter wherein man's wisdom ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... to speak English, and I have tried to represent the thing she did speak, which was neither honest Scotch nor anything like English. Alas! the good, pithy, old Anglo Saxon dialect is fast perishing, and a jargon of corrupt ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... fairly presume, proceeded from the pithy lecture of Ellen Connor; but the truth was, that the undefinable old squire was the greatest parental coward in the world. In the absence of his daughter he would rant and swear and vapor, strike the ground with his staff, and give other indications of the most extraordinary ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... due for that unhappy dinner at Martindale Castle (which was, he said, a crying of peace when there was no peace, and a dwelling in the tents of sin), he imputed his ejection from his living, with the destruction of some of his most pithy and highly prized volumes of divinity, with the loss of his cap, gown, and band, and a double ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... Jeremiah Travis's large estate before the war, he proved by his success that even slaves work better for kindness. Of infinite good sense, but little education, he had a mind that went to the heart of things, and years ago the fame of his homely but pithy sayings stuck in the community. In connection with kindness to his negroes one of his sayings was, "Oh, kindness can't be classified—it takes in the whole ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... talked much of the indefeasible rights of the coming heirs of the new heir. He would have been as firm as a rock, and as trenchant as a sword in defence of his patron's claims. But now, having in his hands that short, pithy letter from Owen Fitzgerald, he could not but look at the matter in a more Christian light. After all, was not justice, immutable justice, better than law? And would not the property be enough for both of them? Might not law and ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... the other end of the vessel, where they established themselves among the anchors, ready as ever to swallow an aliment, that seems to find an unextinguishable appetite for its reception among the vulgar. Here he continued his exhibition, now moralizing in the quaint and often in the pithy manner, which renders the southern buffoon so much superior to his duller competitor of the north, and uttering a wild jumble of wholesome truths, loose morality, and witty inuendoes, the latter of which never failed to extort roars of laughter ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... observes, "This is the first time I have heard it said that our Postilions put on rouge." What he adds, shall be given in his own pithy expression.—"Ou la coquetterie va-t-elle se nicher?" What, however is above stated, was stated from a conviction ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... before she is aware, new Tones she finds she is awaking From the trumpet which young Werner With low bows had handed to her. Easily from him she learneth What her father's cuirassiers blew As the call to charge in battle; Only a few notes and simple, But most pithy and inspiring. ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... negligent as I must have appeared to you with a fortnight's sin upon my shoulders. I tell you with sincerity that I think you have completely succeeded in what you intended to do. What is poetry may be disputed. These are poetry to me at least. They are concise, pithy, and moving. Uniform as they are, and unhistorify'd, I read them thro' at two sittings without one sensation approaching to tedium. I do not know that among your many kind presents of this nature this is not my favourite volume. The language is never lax, and there is a unity of design ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... consider the presence of the American Minister and Senator as an expression of the good-will of the American Government. They looked upon him diplomatically. All that he said was listened to with the deepest respect, which was none the less when they did not comprehend a word. His pithy sentences, when translated into Italian, became the neatest epigrams in the world. His suggestions as to the best mode of elevating and enriching the country were considered by one set as the profoundest philosophy, and by another as the keenest satire. They were determined to lionize ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... Trinity, who was then a young man, embodied the best opinion of the time in an excellent pithy letter. He wrote to me that the trial simply established, what every one believed, that "Sir William Wilde was a pithecoid person of extraordinary sensuality and cowardice (funking the witness-box left him without ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... Joceline Joliffe, lest, perchance, he had been addicted to jealousy. But it was in vain that he plied the faithful damsel, sometimes with verses from the Canticles, sometimes with quotations from Green's Arcadia, or pithy passages from Venus and Adonis, and doctrines of a nature yet more abstruse, from the popular work entitled Aristotle's Masterpiece. Unto no wooing of his, sacred or profane, metaphysical or physical, would Phoebe Mayflower ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... your local papers. Send them short, pithy communications, and, when possible, secure a column in each, to be ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... increased for the new visitor to Lochias; for, with earnest frankness, he pointed out to him certain faults, and while praising the merits of the rapidly-executed figure he explained in a few brief and pithy phrases his own conception of the ideal Urania. Then shortly but clearly, he stated his views as to how the plastic artist must deal with ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... way, yes! And yet perhaps Prince Bismarck has let himself be led away by the seduction of a good phrase into the use of an inexact form. The form of his judgment had to be pithy, striking, engraved within a ring. If he erred, then, no doubt, he erred deliberately. The saying was near enough the truth to serve, and perhaps he did not want to destroy utterly by a more severe definition the prestige of the sham that could not deceive his genius. Prince Bismarck has ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... probably of many more. Some of the choicest flowers of the publications charitably written and circulated by them gratis are upon record in Walsingham and Knyghton: and I am inclined to prefer the pithy and sententious brevity of these bulletins of ancient rebellion before the loose and confused prolixity of the modern advertisements of constitutional information. They contain more good morality and less bad politics, they had much more foundation in real oppression, and they have the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Giordano Bruno, the same philosopher, heretic, and martyr whose statue has recently been erected in Rome, to the great horror of the Pope and his prelates in the Old World and in the New. De Morgan's pithy account of him will interest the company: "Giordano Bruno was all paradox. He was, as has been said, a vorticist before Descartes, an optimist before Leibnitz, a Copernican before Galileo. It would be easy to collect a hundred strange opinions of his. He was born about 1550, and was roasted ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... be accomplished. The occasion was extraordinary, and never contemplated—the exigency beyond immediate solution. As James Dows, one of the coolest in judgment and wisest in counsel of the Executive Committee, pertinently described the situation in the pithy remark, "We started in to hunt cayotes, but we've got a grizzly bear on our hands, and we don't know what to do with him." The Executive Committee were not themselves masters of the situation. Behind them, subject to them and ready to obey their ...
— The Vigilance Committee of '56 • James O'Meara
... Chatham resemble the chemical bodies which acquire entirely new properties when raised beyond a certain degree of temperature. Indeed, we frequently meet touches of the conversational Johnson in his controversial writing. 'Taxation no Tyranny' is at moments almost as pithy as Swift, though the style is never so simple. The celebrated Letter to Chesterfield, and the letter in which he tells MacPherson that he will not be 'deterred from detecting what he thinks a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian,' are as good specimens of the ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... ready method of dealing with obnoxious authors, as poor Peter Wentworth discovered, who wrote A Pithy Exhortation to Her Majesty for establishing her Successor to the Crown, and for his pains was committed to the Tower, where he pined and died. This work advocated the claims of James VI. of Scotland, and was written in answer to a pamphlet ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... encouraging example, while it is possible there were a few that argued less of the danger, in consequence of the indifference of a man who, being so rich, had so many motives to take good care of his person. Be this as it might, the burgher was received by a cheer which drew a short but pithy address from him, in which he exhorted his companions in arms to do their duty, in a manner which should teach the Frenchmen the wisdom of leaving that coast in future free from annoyance; while he wisely ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... news and the brightest "stories." The reputation for a newspaper which has been looked upon as pre-eminently desirable is not that it should be regarded by the public as well-informed or as expressing a sound judgment, but as pithy and interesting. The inevitable consequence of this tendency is that the great mass of English daily newspapers have lost their former high place in the estimation of the public as serious and necessary institutions, and have descended to the level of an amusement. The only exceptions ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... Among other pithy and patriotic points made by him in that great speech —[July 9, 1861.]—were these: "So long as there was a hope of a peaceful solution, I prayed and implored for Compromise. I have spared no effort for a peaceful solution of these ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... read prayers, as he always did; with great distinctness and deliberation, so that everybody in the church, young and old, could catch every syllable; and he preached, considerately enough, a very short sermon—pithy, homely, and affectionate. He reminded them that he was then preaching his thirty-first Christmas-day sermon from that pulpit! The service and the sacrament over, none of the congregation moved from their places ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... of a king who understood his kingly office; and his strict devotion to business, regardless of his own pleasure, could not have been exceeded by a merchant engrossed in lucrative trade. The many pithy and racy sayings recorded of him show an insight into men's characters and the realities of life not unworthy of Dr. Johnson. His simplicity, kindliness, and charity endeared him to his subjects. His undaunted courage and readiness to ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... texts referred to by Aben Ezra as incompatible with the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, see Meyer, Geschichte der Exegese, vol. i, pp. 85-88; and for a pithy short account, Moore's introduction to The Genesis of Genesis, by B. W. Bacon, Hartford, 1893, p. 23; also Curtiss, as above. For a full exhibition of the absolute incompatibility of these texts with the Mosaic authorship, etc., see The Higher Criticism of ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... respecting one of the theories which he had heard for explaining the inundation of the Nile by a supposed connexion with the ocean—that the man who carries up his story into the invisible world, passes out of the range of criticism."[2] And he adds the following pithy note:—"Niebuhr puts together all the mythical and genealogical traces, many of them in the highest degree vague and equivocal, of the existence of Pelasgi in various localities; and then, summing up their cumulative effect, asserts, 'not as an hypothesis, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... successors in the field of Polish letters, has been confirmed by the judgment of posterity. For the chapter on Pan Tadeusz by George Brandes, than whom there have been few more competent judges of modern European literature, is little more than an expansion of Krasinski's pithy sentences. The cosmopolitan critic echoes the patriotic Pole when he writes: "In Pan Tadeusz Poland possesses the only successful epic our ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... art, his poetical efforts are eminently characteristic of the personality of the man. His volumes of short poems—Hofwijck, Cluijswerck, Voorhout and Zeestraet—contain exquisite and witty pictures of life at the Hague—"the village of villages"—and are at once fastidious in form and pithy ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... which doubt on such a matter would surely bring to a man so placed. And yet it was observed of him that he never spoke of his faith, or entered into arguments with men as to the reasons on which he had based it. He was diligent in preaching,—moral sermons that were short, pithy, and useful. He was never weary in furthering the welfare of his clergymen. His house was open to them and to their wives. The edifice of every church in his diocese was a care to him. He laboured at schools, and was zealous in improving the social comforts of the ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... corpulent he also set up a great gingerbread-colored carriage, drawn by a pair of black Flanders mares with tails that swept the ground; and to commemorate the origin of his greatness he had for his crest a full-blown cabbage painted on the panels, with the pithy motto, ALLES KOPF, that is to say, ALL HEAD, meaning thereby that he had risen by ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... the time; refusing, however, all payment for his publications. He entered the lists against Tindal, Chubb, and Mandeville, against Hoadly, against Warburton, against Wesley. His answer to Mandeville is called by J. Sterling 'a most remarkable philosophical essay,' full 'of pithy right reason,'[528] and has been republished by Frederick Maurice, with a highly commendatory introduction. The authority last mentioned also speaks of him as 'a singularly able controversialist in his argument with Hoadly;' ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... his family after his death were to be turned into the street, beggars. If each individual were a unit whose interests ended with himself; if generations were like stratified rocks, superposed one on another but not interconnected; if—to quote a pithy phrase, I do not know from whom—"if all men were born orphans and died bachelors," then the right to draw income from the products of permanently productive capital would for most men lose much of ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... works was condemned, withdrawn from exhibition, and relegated, as a mere wall-picture, to the decoration of the dining-room. Their place was taken by a replica of the original watered announcement, to which, in particularly large letters, he had added the pithy rubric: "No service." Meanwhile he had fallen into something as nearly bordering on low spirits as was consistent with his disposition; depressed, at once by the failure of his scheme, the laughable turn of his late interview, and the judicial ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... conveyance to make calls. I was presented to every one of any note, and drank tea in the best drawing-rooms the Capital could boast of. So far my step-mother looked happy. I had not been awkward at introductions, nor dull in conversations. I had even made some very pithy remarks where they could do me most service, and knew the name of a historic personage to whom Lady Pendleton alluded vaguely, forgetting his title. I was invaded in my turn on our reception day by all the wealth and beauty of the ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... contentious Deputies of the States-General, have probably not long to be here! But, in fine, all shall now withdraw for this day; and meet again, each Order in its separate place, to-morrow morning, for despatch of business. This is the determination of the royal breast: pithy and clear. And herewith King, retinue, Noblesse, majority of Clergy file out, as if the whole matter ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... common-places. Common Place, "Locus communis," was a term used in old rhetoric to represent testimonies or pithy sentences of good authors which might be used for strengthening or adorning a discourse; but said Keckermann, whose Rhetoric was a text-book in the days of James I. and Charles I., "Because it is impossible thus to read through all authors, ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... all remember to have read a pithy string of Maxims by Dr. Franklin; and we are accustomed to admire the pertinence of their wit,—but here their influence too often terminates. Since Franklin's time, the practice of getting into debt has become more and more easy, notwithstanding men have become ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 276 - Volume 10, No. 276, October 6, 1827 • Various
... nations together. Wherever her temple stands and so long as it is duly honored, there is a foundation for social security, general happiness, and the improvement and progress of our race." Perhaps, however, none of these laudations is so vividly impressive as is the pithy remark of an old English judge that "injustice ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... considerable mountain which formed their frontier. Here Xenophon, having marshalled the soldiers for attack, with each company of 100 men in single file, instead of marching up the hill in phalanx, or continuous front with only a scanty depth—addressed to them the following pithy encouragement—"Now, fellow-soldiers, these enemies before us are the only impediment that keeps us away from reaching the point at which we have been so long aiming. We must even eat them raw, if in any way we ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... of explanation. I have been asked why I use the word Sutras, for these rules of Patanjali's system, when the word Aphorism has been connected with them in our minds fora generation. The reason is this: the name Aphorism suggests, to me at least, a pithy sentence of very general application; a piece of proverbial wisdom that may be quoted in a good many sets of circumstance, and which will almost bear on its face the evidence of its truth. But with a Sutra the case is different. ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... conception are also the terse, pithy language which allows us to surmise the unlimited possibilities hidden in the saga literature, and the equally succinct ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... in the day they saw that if the gale lasted—of which there was every prospect—the loss of her spars would result in her separation from the remainder of the fleet, and as they remarked upon this to each other, the men smiled grimly, and exchanged certain short pithy remarks which, had they been heard by the occupants of the saloon, would have produced a feeling ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... and ungenerous treatment that he never recovered, but died in the same year [1245], after having ruled twelve years with the greatest mildness, prudence, and benevolence. This story of the Pope's arbitrary conduct calls forth a very pithy couplet ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... authority of the greatest man of any age, JULIUS CAESAR, of whom Bacon observes, that 'in his book of Apothegms which he collected, we see that he esteemed it more honour to make himself but a pair of tables, to take the wise and pithy words of others, than to have every word of his own to be made ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... and forks, So, sink or float, we swim without the corks. Yours is the art, by native genius taught, To clothe in eloquence the naked thought; Yours is the skill its music to prolong Through the sweet effluence of mellifluous song; Yours the quaint trick to cram the pithy line That cracks so crisply over bubbling wine; And since success your various gifts attends, We—that is, I and all your numerous friends— Expect from you—your single self a host— A speech, a song, excuse me, and a toast; Nay, not to haggle on so small a claim, A few of each, or several ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Pithy paragraphs on a wide range of subjects, not one of which but will be found to contain some terse, sparkling truth worthy of thought and attention. A spare ten minutes devoted to such ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... regretted that London was omitted from the Domesday Survey, for that invaluable record might have furnished us with some information as to the building of the Tower, and perhaps revealed in one of those brief but pithy sentences, pregnant with suggestion, some such ruthless destruction of houses as took place in Oxford and elsewhere[8] in order to clear a site for the King's new castle. Unless the site were then vacant, or perhaps only occupied by a vineyard (for these are mentioned in Domesday ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... with thundering cheers. When silence was restored he made a short, pithy address, which was received with rounds of applause at the close of ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... June he formed the acquaintance of J. E. Hitzig, who came down to Warsaw with the rank of assessor in the administrative college in which Hoffmann held that of councillor. The crust of formal courtesy and commonplaces was broken through by Hitzig's pithy answer, to a question asking his opinion about some newly-arrived colleague, that he was "a man in buckram." The borrowed words of Falstaff banished Hoffmann's reserve, and caused his sombre face to light up with joy and his tongue to pour out a brilliant ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... actually struck up "God save the King" and followed it by "Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves" (I wished at the time she had ruled under the waves as well.) I went back to the room and the Italians were so delighted with my short and pithy speech, that they invited me to dine with them that night and bring two officers with me. When we got down to the square, the mob crowded round us and shook hands with us, and I was afraid that some of the ladies were going to embrace us. I think people thought ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... do it? That Georgian's cue, it, Compared with your sceptre, is just a mere withy. You quietly front in with that calm "Voluntas," (Expressed for our guidance in epigrams pithy) You hint you can rule us, and guide us, and school us, "All off your own bat," without Clergy or Minister, Giving swift gruel to stage-prank, or duel, Or any thing else you think ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 28, 1891 • Various
... this readjustment period, the volunteer should be an optimist, and should exercise common sense in guiding the adult over the first lap of the unfamiliar road. I have advised the volunteers who are now in France, and those preparing to go there, to take writing boards, games, bright, pithy stories, and a lot of nonsense verse. I have told these Red Cross workers that they themselves must know how to laugh, must be able to rise above the horrors about them, for they are there to serve heroes, not cowards, heroes who will laugh with a sob in their throats; heroes ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... to such an extent, that on one occasion he stopped suddenly in the centre of the platform, and with a most gracious and benignant smile, extended his arms at full length and gave the audience a regal blessing, in the following pithy sentence: ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... has no need of it; it is good, forcible 'Scots' after all, and the thoughts he clothes in it are as 'hame-ower' and as pithy as the words. ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... on the several plants, shrubs, and trees which I met with, particularly where any of these occurred to me entirely new), finding myself a little faintish, I had a mind for a sup of ram's-horn juice; so I cut me one, but upon opening it found therein only a pithy pulp, and noways fit to taste. I supposed by this I was too early for the milk, it being three months later the last year when I cut them. Hereon, seeing one upon another shrub, which by its rusty colour I judged might have hung all the winter, I opened that, and found it full of milk; but ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... air of extraordinary importance peculiar to the negro countenance on eventful occasions, a huge brown dish with which she advanced to the head of the table, and with an emphatic bump, answering to the pithy speeches of warriors and statesmen at critical moments, deposited the great Thanksgiving pumpkin pie. Looking proudly ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... thought that it is enough pleaded before them, and the witnesses have said what they can, one of the judges, with a brief and pithy recapitulation, reciteth to the twelve in sum the arguments of the sergeants of either side, that which the witnesses have declared, and the chief points of the evidence showed in writing, and ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... lordship knew the gentleman," enthusiastically writes Walsingham (August 12th, 1571) to the Earl of Leicester. "For courage abroad and counsell at home they give him here the reputation to be another [name in cipher]. He is in speech eloquent and pithy; but which is chiefest, he is in religion, as religious in life as he is sincere in profession. I hope God hath raised him up in these days, to serve for an instrument for the advancement of His glory." ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... Burr, in 1866, to be "a new variety, bouquet not large, but handsome and compact. It is so firm that it remains an unusual length of time without running to seed or becoming pithy." ...
— The Cauliflower • A. A. Crozier
... vocabulary is as apt and as extensive for this purpose as that which suffices for the mental or spiritual needs of the bulk of European people, indeed, the capacity for abstracting the general nature and character from the particular experience or emotion into pithy expressions by way of simile or metaphor that admirably convey the perceived generalisation is as highly evolved in the Native as ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... place, Sancho, do not intermix in thy discourse such a multitude of proverbs as thou wert wont to do; for though proverbs are concise and pithy sentences, thou dost so often drag them in by the head and shoulders that they look more like the ravings of distraction than ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... And that pithy chapter in Machiavelli's Prince which treats of cruelty and clemency, and whether it be better to be loved or feared, anticipates the defence of the Terrorists, in the maxim that for a new prince it is impossible to avoid the name of cruel, because all new states abound ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... Roi.' ''Tis a pithy prolegomenon,' quoth I, and so read on.... 'By all which it appears,' quoth I, having read it over a little too rapidly, 'that if a man sets out in a post-chaise for Paris, he must go on travelling in one all the days of his life, or pay ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... surprised to find a recipe against baldness under the title of "The Age of Love." But then "The Age of Love" is an absurd and answerless question. Experience shows that all ages fall in love—and out again; so that, to quote the pithy Bacon again, "a man may have a quarrel to marry when he will." Octogenarians elope, and Mr. Gilbert's elderly baby died a blase old ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... crowds of the very old, and the very young, to whom an Engine heretofore had been a figment of imagination, gazed with wonder at 'The Montgomery' while their more travelled neighbours adjourned to the Bowling Green, where Mr. R. Owen made a short pithy speech. He very properly acknowledged the business-like activity of Messrs. Davies and Savin, to whom the public were so largely indebted for the arrival of a locomotive at Welshpool. Mr. Webb, on behalf of the contractors, ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... in spite of all the deductions we have to make from it in the case of limited wars, is the dominating one. The pithy maxim which expresses its essence is that our primary objective is the enemy's main force. In current naval literature the maxim is applied to the sea in some such form as this: "The primary object of our battle-fleet is to seek out and destroy ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... fair, for seven days vigorously was the sutra intoned by the loudest and most brazen of his subordinates, backed by the whole body of priests. Day and night a priest would slip to the side altar, to invoke the pity of the Buddha on the wandering spirit of the deceased lady in few pithy but hasty words, and to spend the rest of his vigil in ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... which we had, through the trees, a glimpse of a stately mansion. Our guard was a genuine Irishman, strongly resembling the late actor Power in physiognomy, with the very brogue which Power sometimes gave to his personages. He was a man of pithy speech, communicative, and acquainted apparently with every body, of every class, whom we passed on the road. Besides him we had for fellow-passengers three very intelligent Irishmen, on their way to Dublin. One of them was a tall, handsome gentleman, with dark ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... the conduct of public business, saw his way clear, made other men see theirs, was forever getting the Synod out of difficulties and confusions, by some clear, tidy, conclusive "motion;" and then his speaking, so easy and bright and pithy, manly and gentlemanly, grave when it should be, never when it should not—mobile, fearless, rapid, brilliant as Saladin—his silent, pensive, impassioned and emphatic friend was more like the lion-hearted Richard, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... long list of his published works his history of the academy, in four quarto volumes: a wonderful work, whether considered from an historical, psychological, or philosophical point of view. His address on that occasion was masterly, and his conversation at various social functions instructive and pithy. I remember in one of them, especially, his delineation of the characteristics and services of Leibnitz, who was one of the founders of the Royal Academy, and it was perfection in that kind of conversation ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... reflected, he would know that only one person has once decided to use the word, but he does not reflect, and the effect on him is the same as if a hundred persons had used it independently of each other. The contents-bills, indeed, of the newspapers, which were originally short and pithy merely from considerations of space, have developed in a way which threatens to turn our streets (like the advertisement pages of an American magazine) into a psychological laboratory for the unconscious production of permanent associations. ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... for the first time nor the last—that men count for more than machines, that courage and enterprise can reverse in the actual fight the conditions that beforehand would seem to make defeat inevitable. "Give me plenty of iron in the men, and I don't mind so much about iron in the ships," was a pithy saying of the American Admiral Farragut. There was iron enough in the Austrian sailors, Tegethoff and Petz, to outweigh all the iron in the guns and armour of the Italian admirals, Persano and Albini, and the "iron in the men" gave victory to the fleet that on paper ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... crew, Norfolk lads. It is told that to one, whose father he knew to be a strong Whig, of the party which in the past few years had sympathized with the general current of the French Revolution, he gave the following pithy counsels for his guidance in professional life: "First, you must always implicitly obey orders, without attempting to form any opinion of your own respecting their propriety; secondly, you must consider every man as your enemy who ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... "you know perfectly well that your style must come to your aid in whatever you try to write. Then your fiction is not so remarkable for plot as for the careful development of character and your pithy remarks. Your powers of epigram would be abundantly brought to the fore in such a subject as Tom asked you to write about. But never mind, my dear, it is your pleasure to duplicate yourself—I do not think it is at ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... pithy at reply, young man; but I know something of Jacob Armitage, and we know," continued he, putting his finger close to some writing opposite the name on the list, "with whom he has been associated, and with whom ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... understood that every accident implies a total wreck, with the loss of all hands. If a ship carries away any of her important spars, or, on entering her port, strikes heavily against a pier, whereby serious damage is occasioned, the accident is duly registered in this pithy chronicle of Lloyd's. Nevertheless, as we glance up and down the columns, it is no exaggeration to say, that two-thirds of the accidents recorded are of the most serious description. We are unable to say to what degree this ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... Dicky, as became a pair who had only been married a few months, proving but broken reeds. A week's electioneering proved sufficient for their requirements; and, declining flatly to "grin like a dog and run about the city"—Dilly's pithy summary of the art of canvassing—any longer, they left us ten days before polling-day to pay a country-house visit. But Robin was everywhere. He answered my letters and he interviewed reporters. He could keep a meeting in hand (pending my arrival from another) with such success that ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... Abelard' must be carefully weighed in this connection. On the other hand, it may well be doubted if he can ever be excelled as a master in satire and kindred semi-prosaic forms. He is supreme in epigrams, the terse statement of pithy truths; his poems have furnished more brief familiar quotations to our language than those of any other writer except Shakspere. For this sort of effect his rimed couplet provided him an unrivalled instrument, and ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... the time to spare, and, indeed, he was keen enough to hear the solution of the mystery. A short explanation from David, followed by a few pithy, pertinent questions to Van Sneck, and he ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... more nauseating as the Siege advanced in seriousness, until anything in the nature of news was deemed of necessity a lie. A local scribe, "The Lad," took the romancers severely to task in a series of pithy articles, which the Diamond Fields' Advertiser—domiciled though it was in a glass house—did not scruple to publish. The "lovely liar" was hanged, drawn, and quartered. The "Military critic" was satirised, too; he was the lynx-eyed gentleman ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... not unfrequently to make one out for themselves. This style of declamation has been not unaptly called "splendid nonsense," and it was after a display of this sort from Burke, that one of his audience made this pithy exclamation: "It is all very well, but I should like to hear it over again, that I might consider the sense." Burke also dealt in paradoxes occasionally; in short, he will seldom satisfy a careful reader, and his most ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... would they avail, when the chances were fairer for us—the collision more even? When the fight at Moodkee was done, there was not, of the surviving victors, a Queen's soldier or a sepoy who had not already settled to his own satisfaction the whole campaign of the Sutlej, in the pithy but comprehensive conviction, that he should drub the Sikhs whenever he met them. The logician smiles at the vulnerable reasoning; the soldier smiles, too, and feels himself clad in better armour than ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... if there is not something under the surface in Sol Smith's charity sermon? I rather like its pithy style: ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... stood, while the full significance of her refusal ate slowly into his consciousness. Whatever hopes he might have had had been swept away in those few short, pithy sentences. His passion checked, the structure erected by his imagination toppled to ruin, his vanity hurt, he stood before her stripped of the veneer that had made him seem, heretofore, nearly the man he professed ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... he afterward so signally illustrated in act and embodied in maxims of his own that have already been quoted. He did not employ the terminology of the art, which, though possibly pedantic in sound, is invaluable for purposes of discussion; but he expressed its leading principles in pithy, homely phrases of his own, which showed how accurate his grasp of it was. "If once you get in a soldier's rear, he is gone," was probably in part a bit of good-natured chaff at the sister profession; ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... often bestowed upon a first effort is as frequently converted into censure on the older offender. My arguments have, however, totally failed, and he remains obdurate and unmoved. Under these circumstances I have yielded; and as, happily for me, the short and pithy direction to the river Thames, in the Critic, "to keep between its banks," has been imitated by my friend, I find all that is required of me is to write my name upon the title and go in peace. Such, he informs me, ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... before they grow and become soft and pithy. Seeds may be sown as soon as the ground ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... man named Alexander Kielland, from the little coast-town of Stavanger. There was none of the crudity of a provincial dither in his manners or his appearance. He spoke with a quiet self-possession and a pithy ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... evidence of guilt and that no time should be considered long where the life of a man is in question he was snubbed, just as the Roman lady who was expostulated with for taking her bath in the presence of man slaves asked "An servus homo?" The horrible but pithy dialogue reads: ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... through Russia, in one hour and thirty-five minutes, and the sequel of this curious passage of astronomical romance may be appropriately told in the words in which Mr. Pogson replied to Herr Klinkerflues's pithy message. The answer was dated Madras, the 6th of December, and ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... up a great gingerbread-colored carriage drawn by a pair of black Flanders mares with tails that swept the ground; and to commemorate the origin of his greatness he had for a crest a fullblown cabbage painted on the pannels, with the pithy motto Alles Kopf that is to say, ALL HEAD; meaning thereby that he had risen ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... to Taxila a number of Brahmin ascetics noted for their skill in answering philosophical questions with pithy wisdom. An account of the verbal skirmish is given by Plutarch; Alexander himself framed all ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... dwindle with each day's expenditure, and his family after his death were to be turned into the street, beggars. If each individual were a unit whose interests ended with himself; if generations were like stratified rocks, superposed one on another but not interconnected; if—to quote a pithy phrase, I do not know from whom—"if all men were born orphans and died bachelors," then the right to draw income from the products of permanently productive capital would for most men lose much of ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... most pithy criticism of Spenser when he called him the poets' poet. We may fairly leave the allegory on one side, for perhaps, after all, he adopted it only for the reason that it was in fashion, and put it on as he did his ruff, not because it was becoming, but because it was the ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... you do it? That Georgian's cue, it, Compared with your sceptre, is just a mere withy. You quietly front in with that calm "Voluntas," (Expressed for our guidance in epigrams pithy) You hint you can rule us, and guide us, and school us, "All off your own bat," without Clergy or Minister, Giving swift gruel to stage-prank, or duel, Or any thing else ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 28, 1891 • Various
... I have one for thee from Oxford, pithy and apposite, sound and solid, and trimmed up becomingly, as a collar of brawn with a crown of rosemary, or a boar's head with ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... accomplished. The occasion was extraordinary, and never contemplated—the exigency beyond immediate solution. As James Dows, one of the coolest in judgment and wisest in counsel of the Executive Committee, pertinently described the situation in the pithy remark, "We started in to hunt cayotes, but we've got a grizzly bear on our hands, and we don't know what to do with him." The Executive Committee were not themselves masters of the situation. Behind them, subject to them and ready to obey their commands on ordinary occasions, ...
— The Vigilance Committee of '56 • James O'Meara
... of De Morgan's correspondents. But the name most likely to arrest us is that of Giordano Bruno, the same philosopher, heretic, and martyr whose statue has recently been erected in Rome, to the great horror of the Pope and his prelates in the Old World and in the New. De Morgan's pithy account of him will interest the company: "Giordano Bruno was all paradox. He was, as has been said, a vorticist before Descartes, an optimist before Leibnitz, a Copernican before Galileo. It would be easy to collect a hundred strange opinions of his. He was born about 1550, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... John Brown's raid into Virginia kindled the ire of the slave-holders to a degree as yet unprecedented, and although his act found few defenders in the Northern States, the heroism with which he met his fate, the pithy correspondence between Gov. Wise and Mrs. Child, the language of Southern senators in dealing with the subject, and the efforts made to ferret out Brown's associates, all tended to strengthen the growing hostility to slavery ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... we may fairly presume, proceeded from the pithy lecture of Ellen Connor; but the truth was, that the undefinable old squire was the greatest parental coward in the world. In the absence of his daughter he would rant and swear and vapor, strike the ground with his staff, ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... taught to use sharp repartee, seasoned with humour, and whatever they said was to be concise and pithy. For Lycurgus, as we have observed, fixed but a small value on a considerable quantity of his iron money; but, on the contrary, the worth of speech was to consist in its being comprised in a few plain words, pregnant with a great deal of sense: and he contrived that by long silence they ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... which were the only trees of that species in this neighbourhood. These palms are well adapted for canoes, as the bark, or rather the outside wood, is intensely hard for about an inch and a half, beneath which the tree is simply a pithy, stringy substance, that can be rapidly ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... and business-like, the dialogue short and pithy, with considerable interspersion of proverbial phrase, but with, except in case of bad texts, very little obscurity. It is, however, much interspersed also with verses which, like Icelandic verse in general, are alliterative in prosody, and often of the extremest euphuism ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... unpleasant vitality as that. What may have happened to the "stools" after Mabel was married to Sir Hubert, we cannot take it upon us to say. At any rate, we prefer the Scotch poet's description, as somewhat the more pithy, and graphic, and intelligible of the two. The coincidence, however, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... admirable short stories of the sea, very simply told, and placed before the reader in pithy and telling ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... hundred and forty four thousand sealed servants of God; (ch. vii. 4.) They are the same in short, as the two witnesses.... They constitute the persecuted church in the wilderness."—I cannot but think the evidence of identity here irresistible; and in the pithy language of the Doctor on another point, I say,—"A man must shut his eyes not to see" the correctness of Mr. Faber's interpretation of this identity. The Doctor's censure of English expositors in one of his notes will too often justly apply to other divines in expounding prophecy:—"They have greatly ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... attentive ear. But, on this occasion, up to the moment of putting his lips to the old woman's ear, Mr. Dimmesdale, as the great enemy of souls would have it, could recall no text of Scripture, nor aught else, except a brief, pithy, and, as it then appeared to him, unanswerable argument against the immortality of the human soul. The instilment thereof into her mind would probably have caused this aged sister to drop down dead, at once, as by the effect of an intensely poisonous infusion. ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... this was followed, in 1845, by a critical military work of great merit, "The Russo-Turkish Campaign of 1828-29 in European Turkey," which created a deep impression in military circles, and proved of considerable service in the Russo-Turkish campaign of 1877-78. Moltke's pithy and laconic style was founded on the model of his chief, General von Mueffling, his instructor in practical and theoretical tactics, in which the members of the German General Staff are required to ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... when already part Of the troops were embarked, the siege to raise, A courier on the spur inspired new heart Into all panters for newspaper praise,[hn] As well as dilettanti in War's art, By his despatches (couched in pithy phrase) Announcing the appointment of that lover of Battles to the command, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... Perhaps there is a slight falling off in 'Following the Equator'; a trace of fatigue, of weariness, of disenchantment. But the last book of travels has passages as broadly humorous as any of the first; and it proves the author's possession of a pithy shrewdness not to be suspected from a perusal of its earliest predecessor. The first book was the work of a young fellow rejoicing in his own fun and resolved to make his readers laugh with him or at him; the latest book is the work of an older man, who has found that life is ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... element for success in top-working hickory trees. The technique of grafting has been so simplified as to make it fairly easy, and native stocks are usually vigorous. But unless the scions have full vitality success will be limited. They should be plump and not pithy. A limited success is possible with scions of feeble growth, or those subjected to devitalising influences in keeping or handling, but the largest success will be had with well grown scions, cut ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... such a turn. I always liked dearly to hear what he had to say about either pictures or books; because without pretending to be a connoisseur, he always spoke his thought, and that was sure to be fresh: very often it was also just and pithy. It was pleasant also to tell him some things he did not know—he listened so kindly, so teachably; unformalized by scruples lest so to bend his bright handsome head, to gather a woman's rather obscure and ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... remark of Herodotus respecting one of the theories which he had heard for explaining the inundation of the Nile by a supposed connexion with the ocean—that the man who carries up his story into the invisible world, passes out of the range of criticism."[2] And he adds the following pithy note:—"Niebuhr puts together all the mythical and genealogical traces, many of them in the highest degree vague and equivocal, of the existence of Pelasgi in various localities; and then, summing up their cumulative effect, asserts, 'not as an hypothesis, but with full historical ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... choosing to consort with them, and partly for what I had gained. As having nothing, yet possessing all things; as poor, yet making many rich—the boast of St. Paul, the hope of St. Francis of Assisi! in those pithy antitheses is the summa ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... sound?' 'Why did you not the evil shun,' Quoth Towser, 'as you might have done? If you, whose interest was more, Could sleep and leave an open door, Think you that I, a dog at best, Would watch, and lose my precious rest?' This pithy speech had been, in truth, Good logic in a master's mouth; But, coming from a menial's lip, It even lack'd the lawyership To save ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... themselves on the ground, he makes known the object of his coming. I regret I cannot give here his exact answer, for all who read this would wish to know the very words he used on this momentous occasion. No doubt they were, like all he said, terse, pithy, and in such scriptural phrase as was with him so habitual. I know only the substance of what he said, and it was as follows: that the young brave had been killed by one not belonging to the Watauga community; that the murderer had fled, but when apprehended would be dealt with as his crime ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... by the inferior landholders and clergy, who usually ornamented their state apartments with hangings of a sort of stamped leather, manufactured in the Netherlands, garnished with trees and aminals executed in copper foil, and with many a pithy sentence of morality, which, although couched in Low Dutch, were perhaps as much attended to in practice as if written in broad Scotch. The whole had somewhat of a gloomy aspect; but the fire, composed of old pitch-barrel staves, blazed merrily up the chimney; the bed was decorated with linen ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... community of race, religion, language, and interest, united in a sort of Masonic association, whereof his house became one of the centres of reunion. There, aware of his gentle descent, and impressed with his transcendent abilities; charmed with his conversation—as pithy as it was apt to be impure—his wit, his taste, his information, his judgment; sensible, too, of the excellence of his wines, and luxuriance of his table, around which military officer and civil servant, merchant ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... spoken to my confessor about the great anxiety it gave me to find I could not meditate, nor exert my imagination in order to pray. Subjects of prayer which were too extensive were useless to me. Those which were short and pithy ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... them, along with the dissolution of their ancient state, the knowledge of Himself, the only living and true God, and of Jesus Christ whom He hath sent. 8. I have little more to add on the opinions of Confucius. Many of his sayings are pithy, and display much knowledge of character; but as they are contained in the body of the Work, I will not occupy the space here with a selection of those which have struck myself as most worthy of notice. The fourth Book ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... character, must be sacrificed with the pronunciation which one at last consents to alter. And this intolerable demand was made by men and women of education, whose convictions I could not adopt, whose injustice I thought I felt, though I was unable to make it plain to myself. Allusions to the pithy biblical texts were to be forbidden me, as well as the use of the honest-hearted expressions from the Chronicles. I had to forget that I had read the "Kaiser von Geisersberg," and eschew the use of proverbs, which nevertheless, instead of much fiddle-faddle, just hit the nail upon the head,—all ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... manner of pithy sayings, many of them wise, a few of them profound, and not one which is unworthy a second reading. It is to be hoped that he will escape the doubtful honor of being dispersedly set forth in a 'Wit and Wisdom of Thomas Hardy.' Such books are a depressing species of literature and seem chiefly designed ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... courage and enterprise can reverse in the actual fight the conditions that beforehand would seem to make defeat inevitable. "Give me plenty of iron in the men, and I don't mind so much about iron in the ships," was a pithy saying of the American Admiral Farragut. There was iron enough in the Austrian sailors, Tegethoff and Petz, to outweigh all the iron in the guns and armour of the Italian admirals, Persano and Albini, ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... with opposing the authority of the greatest man of any age, JULIUS CAESAR, of whom Bacon observes, that 'in his book of Apothegms which he collected, we see that he esteemed it more honour to make himself but a pair of tables, to take the wise and pithy words of others, than to have every word of his own to be made ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the Proverbs is so called because it is such as containeth hard, dark, and pithy sentences of wisdom, by which is taught unto young men knowledge and discretion (1-6). Wherefore this book is not such as discloseth truths by words antecedent or subsequent to the text, so as other scriptures ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... dependence of the citizens upon the Court, etc. etc.,—all these conditions, within which German society and a political organization corresponding thereto developed, are transformed by Heinzen's bluff common sense into a few pithy sayings, the pith of which consists in the assertion that "German princedom" made and ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... enjoyed watching it, as it scolded him from a high limb, but he could not delay and he set about his task quickly. Cutting off the end of each quill, he scraped it clean inside and washed the pithy part out. He had seen his father prepare a quill in this ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... place where the conversation was a continual attempt at smartness; it must have been most fatiguing. The weak point, indeed, of this public life was the demand it created for conversational display. The greater part of Johnson's pithy sayings were delivered in such a mixed company, and were prepared in sonorous ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... he formed the acquaintance of J. E. Hitzig, who came down to Warsaw with the rank of assessor in the administrative college in which Hoffmann held that of councillor. The crust of formal courtesy and commonplaces was broken through by Hitzig's pithy answer, to a question asking his opinion about some newly-arrived colleague, that he was "a man in buckram." The borrowed words of Falstaff banished Hoffmann's reserve, and caused his sombre face to light up with joy and his tongue to pour out ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... Christ's College, Cambridge, 'A Ryght Pithy, Pleasaunt, and merie Comedie, intytuled Gammer Gurton's Needle.' The authorship is uncertain, recent investigation having exalted a certain Stevenson into rivalry with the Bishop Still to whom former scholars were content to assign it. Possibly as ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... near, the artillery ceased, the close fight began, and several regiments at once poured in their fire: both sides kept their ground, and hundreds fell at every discharge of musketry. The duke now, in the pithy and familiar language of the soldier, cried out to the Scots, "Ninety-second, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... with a ready wit and a lively sense of humour, are among the characteristics of Saadi's masterly compositions. No writer, ancient or modern, European or Asiatic, has excelled, and few have equalled, Saadi in that rare faculty for condensing profound moral truths into short, pithy sentences. For example: ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... took her seat amid warm applause. A number of brief, pithy speeches were made and all dispersed with a hearty Godspeed to the talented lady in ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... death of Pitt, was that of a king who understood his kingly office; and his strict devotion to business, regardless of his own pleasure, could not have been exceeded by a merchant engrossed in lucrative trade. The many pithy and racy sayings recorded of him show an insight into men's characters and the realities of life not unworthy of Dr. Johnson. His simplicity, kindliness, and charity endeared him to his subjects. His undaunted courage and readiness to undertake sole responsibility, not ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... never have been attempted before." When the change of rulers took place, some of the French inhabitants objected to take the oath of allegiance to the British Crown, and a letter on the subject was sent to Napoleon. His comment was pithy: "I should like to see anybody refuse me the oath of allegiance in any country I ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... as the exact phraseology is often important, I shall usually cite the original Icelandic, and (for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with that language) shall also give the Latin version, which has been well made, and quite happily reflects the fresh and pithy vigour of the original. An English translation of all the essential parts may be found in De Costa, Pre-Columbian Discovery of America by the Northmen, 2d ed., Albany, 1890; see also Slafter, Voyages of the Northmen to ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... of the Parsees presents, as usual, an amusing contrast with the highflown rhapsodies of the Moslem; their remarks on the same lady are comprised in the pithy observation—"We should not have taken her for more than twenty-six years of age; but we are told ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... and those of his wife and mother-in-law, had all been tolerably short and pithy, written in a straight hand, with the lines very close together. Sometimes the whole letter was contained on a mere scrap of paper. The paper was very yellow, and the ink very brown; some of the sheets were (as Miss Matty made me observe) the old original post, with ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... down Hester street and up Chrystie, and down Delancey to where he lived. And there his women folk, a bibulous mother and three dingy sisters, pounced upon him for his wages. And at his confession they shrieked and objurgated him in the pithy rhetoric of the locality. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... everywhere, yet these were only navigable at high tide, and at all other times were impassable marshes. There were but few posts where the enemy were within rifle range, and their occasional attacks at those points were soon stopped by our enforcement of a pithy order from General Hunter, "Give them as good as they send." So that, with every opportunity for being kept on the alert, there was small prospect of serious danger; and all promised an easy life, with only enough of care to make it pleasant. The picket station was ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... had a unique and pithy way of expressing this reality. He said that soil was not capable of working two jobs at once. You could not expect it to nitrify humus while it was also being required to digest organic matter. That's one reason he thought composting was ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... was brief and to the point. It opened with a pithy but pungent expression of Don Silvio's opinion of the capacity of a Governor who could permit his city to be captured and held by a handful of English pirates; then proceeded succinctly to refuse to accede to any of those pirates' demands; and wound ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... lady repeat the following pithy lines, and shall be glad if any of your readers can tell me who is the author, and where ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various
... 'butterwoman's rate to market', and the 'very false gallop of verses'. It has been advocated, in opposition to the heroic measure, upon the ground that ten syllables lead a man into epithets and other superfluities, while eight syllables compress him into a sensible and pithy gentleman. But the heroic measure laughs at it. So far from compressing, it converts one line into two, and sacrifices everything to the quick and importunate return of the rhyme. With Dryden, compare Gay, even ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... However, as to this honest porter, you must know that when we presented ourselves at the gate yonder, his brain was over-burdened with a speech that had been penned for him, and which proved rather an overmatch for his gigantic faculties. Now this same pithy oration had been indited, like sundry others, by my learned magister, Erasmus Holiday, so I had heard it often enough to remember every line. As soon as I heard him blundering and floundering like a fish upon dry land, through the first verse, and perceived him ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... Among my pleasantest memories of Los Angeles are my visits to Madame Fremont in her pretty red cottage, presented by loving friends. It is a privilege to meet such a clever, versatile woman. Her conversation flashes with epigrams and pithy sayings, and her heart is almost as young as when it was captured by the ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... They could only in a slight degree appreciate the nautical phraseology in which he had been wont to convey some of his strongest sentiments, and they could not in any degree enter into his feelings when, forgetting for a moment his circumstances, he came out with a pithy forecastle allusion to the politics or the ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... oblong, and pointed. It is an evergreen, and bears fruits and blossoms all the year round. The fruits are pointed oval pods, six inches long, and contain in five compartments from twenty-five to thirty seeds or kernels, enveloped in a white pithy pulp with a sweet taste. These seeds when dried form the cocoa of commerce, from which the beverage is made and chocolate is manufactured. There are three harvests in the year, when the pods are pulled from the trees and gathered ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... the way of scientific exposition than those early articles of his on the origin of species. He swept the curve of discussion through the really significant points of the subject, enriched his exposition with profound original remarks and reflections, often summing up in a single pithy sentence an argument which a less compact mind would have spread over pages. But there is one impression made by the book itself which no exposition of it, however luminous, can convey; and that is the impression ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... before you touch the instrument, To learne the order of my fingering, I must begin with rudiments of Art, To teach you gamoth in a briefer sort, More pleasant, pithy, and effectuall, Then hath beene taught by any of my trade, And there it is in ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... your pupil must first have been a little scapegrace. The Spartans were educated in this way; not tied down to books, but obliged to steal their dinners;[17] and did this produce men inferior in understanding? Who does not remember their forcible, pithy sayings? Trained to conquer, they worsted their enemies in every kind of encounter; and the babbling Athenians dreaded their sharp speeches quite as ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... his 'Pilgrim's Progress'— a book full of pithy English idiom. "The common folk had the wit at once to see the worth of Bunyan's masterpiece, and the learned long afterwards followed in the wake of the common ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... is thought that it is enough pleaded before them, and the witnesses have said what they can, one of the judges, with a brief and pithy recapitulation, reciteth to the twelve in sum the arguments of the sergeants of either side, that which the witnesses have declared, and the chief points of the evidence showed in writing, and once ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... written mostly by paid helpers from short English abstracts. He regarded Latin as the only language worthy of a great work; but the world neglected his Latin to seize upon his English,—marvelous English, terse, pithy, packed with thought, in an age that used endless circumlocutions. The first ten essays, published in 1597, were brief notebook jottings of Bacon's observations. Their success astonished the author, but ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... They took possession of the throne as though they had only been absent on a pleasure excursion, and, ignoring twenty years of parvenu glory, affected to be merely continuing an uninterrupted sovereignty. The pithy remark of Talleyrand, that "they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing," was abundantly verified. Close following in their wake, came hordes of emigrants famished by long exile and clamorous ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... thirteenth, when already part Of the troops were embark'd, the siege to raise, A courier on the spur inspired new heart Into all panters for newspaper praise, As well as dilettanti in war's art, By his despatches couch'd in pithy phrase; Announcing the appointment of that lover of Battles to the ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... i.e. with the personal pronoun in the dative instead of the accusative case. The expression mi souviene is equivalent to mi ricordo, but is a more elegant form that the latter; and the meaning of the motto will be "I seldom forget,"—a pithy and suggestive sentence, implying as much the memory of a wrong to be avenged as of ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 28. Saturday, May 11, 1850 • Various
... shrubs, and trees which I met with, particularly where any of these occurred to me entirely new), finding myself a little faintish, I had a mind for a sup of ram's-horn juice; so I cut me one, but upon opening it found therein only a pithy pulp, and noways fit to taste. I supposed by this I was too early for the milk, it being three months later the last year when I cut them. Hereon, seeing one upon another shrub, which by its rusty colour I judged might ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... and if ever I be able, I will deserve it of him. One only thing, as it comes into my mind, let me remember you of, that you consider wherein the Historian excelleth, and that to note: as DION NICAEUS in the searching the secrets of government; TACITUS, in the pithy opening of the venom of wickedness; and ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... Place, "Locus communis," was a term used in old rhetoric to represent testimonies or pithy sentences of good authors which might be used for strengthening or adorning a discourse; but said Keckermann, whose Rhetoric was a text-book in the days of James I. and Charles I., "Because it is impossible thus to read through all authors, there are books that give students of eloquence ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... is old. The pithy phrase in the shrewd Roman's mouth was two-edged, and had a sharp point. The enterprise that led to no ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... has attempted to formulate the relationships between causes and effects without, however, always possessing the specific knowledge essential to accuracy. Pithy statements have always had great appeal to man, as evidenced by the existence of proverbs, maxims, and adages preserved from times of great antiquity. Frequently, however, such statements are not expressive of the truth. ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... obscenities that taint the air and brutalize life elsewhere, were in this quaint old settlement unknown. Sweet thought, pure speech, went hand in hand, clad in nervous, pithy old English, or a "patois" of the French, mellowed and enlarged by their constant use of the liquid Indian tongues, flowing like soft-sounding waters about them, their daily talk came ever welcome ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... brought to Rome, and on account of his wit manumitted by his master; made his mark by composing memoirs and a collection of pithy sayings that appear to have been used as a school-book; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... well that they were lying, but for the moment he let it pass. He had an idea that Stratton could throw some light on the situation, and leaving the prisoners to digest a few pithy truths, he took the cow-puncher into his private ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... however, Phocion was pure and patriotic in his motives, and a man of the strictest integrity. It was his unquestioned probity and his peculiar disinterestedness that gave him such influence with the people. As an orator, too, he commanded attention by his striking and pithy brevity. "He knew so well," says GROTE, "on what points to strike, that his telling brevity, strengthened by the weight of character and position, cut through the fine oratory of Demosthenes more ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... civilized nations together. Wherever her temple stands and so long as it is duly honored, there is a foundation for social security, general happiness, and the improvement and progress of our race." Perhaps, however, none of these laudations is so vividly impressive as is the pithy remark of an old English judge that "injustice ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... published a valuable collection of financial essays, entitled The Banker's Commonplace Book, containing Mr. A. B. Johnson's pithy treatise on the Principles of Banking and the Duties of a Banker, Gilbart's Ten Minutes' Advice on Keeping a Bank, with several articles on Bills of Exchange, and a summary of the Banking Laws of Massachusetts. It will prove a useful manual on ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... piece of whity-brown packing-paper, but only over one half of the circumference; the other half is left bare, so that I may watch the Osmia's attempts. Well, the captive insect fiercely attacks this lining, which to its eyes represents the pithy layer of its usual abode; it tears it away by tiny particles and strives to cut itself a road between the cocoon and the glass wall. The males, who are a little smaller, have a better chance of success than the females. Flattening themselves, making themselves thin, slightly ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... neglected one thing that she was asked to do, or showed the smallest feeling on the occasion beyond a general sense of dissatisfaction at all things connected with the sea. But of all our sufferers none equalled my poor cousin. Not a word was to be got out of her, but short pithy anathemas against everybody that came near her, everybody that spoke to her, every lurch the ship made, every noise overhead; an expression of pity caused an explosion of wrath, a hope that she was better a wish that she was dead, and an offer of assistance a command to be ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... of good fables,—pithy wisdom, ingenious moral instances, homely illustrations, easy colloquial dialogue; and the ethical teaching has a striking superficial likeness to the common-sense morality of prudence and content, which fables, like proverbs, ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... way to salvation, or between different salutary acts, but indiscriminately postulate for all the illuminating grace of the intellect and the strengthening grace of the will. It follows that to perform salutary acts the justified no less than the unjustified need actual grace. Our Saviour's pithy saying: "Without me you can do nothing,"(348) was not addressed to unbelievers or sinners, but to His Apostles, who were in the ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... a stalk about fifteen feet in height yearly, which, after flowering, grows stalky and brittle, and remains an unsightly thing. The interior is pithy, but after the death of the stalk the pith contracts, and leaves the greater portion of the interior hollow, as we have seen in the case of the cactus branches. How the birds found that these stalks were hollow is a problem not yet solved, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... years. In so small a community, where every one knew every one else, personal, social, and political questions became hopelessly intertwined. The fighting was bitter. 'Forced into a cleft stick, there was nothing left for us but to break it,' was Howe's pithy way of putting the case. Naturally enough, the stick objected to being broken. And as in every war, for one man killed in battle five or six die from other causes connected with the war—bad boots, ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... kitchen-door bearing before her, with that air of extraordinary importance peculiar to the negro countenance on eventful occasions, a huge brown dish with which she advanced to the head of the table, and with an emphatic bump, answering to the pithy speeches of warriors and statesmen at critical moments, deposited the great Thanksgiving pumpkin pie. Looking proudly around, she simply ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... so far as we can reach the reality of his life, was an orator who wielded the apologue with remarkable skill. From a servile condition, he rose, by the force of his genius, to be the counsellor of kings and states. His wisdom was in demand far and wide, and on the most important occasions. The pithy apologues which fell from his lips, which, like the rules of arithmetic, solved the difficult problems of human conduct constantly presented to him, were remembered when the speeches that contained them were forgotten. He seems to have written nothing himself; ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... chivalrous element disappears in the novels of the English who imitated Cervantes. "These English novelists since Richardson's reign," says Heine, "are prosaic natures; to the prudish spirit of their time even pithy descriptions of the life of the common people are repugnant, and we see on yonder side of the Channel those bourgeoisie novels arise, wherein the petty humdrum life of the middle classes is depicted." But Scott appeared, and effected a restoration of the balance in fiction. As ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... full share. The family circle was, quietly, a very lively one; there was no stagnating anywhere. He and Mrs. Caxton had many subjects and interests in common of which they talked freely, and Eleanor was only too glad to listen. There were books and reviews read aloud sometimes, with very pithy discussion of the same; in fact, there was conversation, truly deserving the name; such as Eleanor never listened to before she came to Plassy, and which she enjoyed hugely. Then the walks after natural objects were on the whole frequent; and Mr. Rhys was sure to ask her to go along; ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... defects. 1st. They were like the wooden part of a bow instead of its string. 2d. They yielded to gravity—kept tending down, down, to the righthand corner more and more. In the use of capitals the writer had taken the copyhead as his model. The style, however, was pithy, and in writing that is the first Christian grace—no, I forgot, it is the ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... conversant, as appears from his satires against the Jesuits, in which there is discovered as much learning as wit. In the second volume of the great historical, geographical, and poetical Dictionary, he is stiled the Darling of the Muses, a pithy, sententious, elegant, and smooth writer: "His translations exceed the original, and his invention seems matchless. His satire against the Jesuits is of special note; he may be justly said to have excelled all the satirists of the age." Tho' this compliment ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... better known in this nation, among Azevedo's work we should be quick to appreciate such a pithy book as the Livro de uma Sogra,—the Book of a Mother-in-Law. And when the literature of these United States is at last (if ever, indeed!) released from the childish, hypocritical, Puritanic inhibitions forced upon it by quasi official societies, we may even relish, from ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... we all remember to have read a pithy string of Maxims by Dr. Franklin; and we are accustomed to admire the pertinence of their wit,—but here their influence too often terminates. Since Franklin's time, the practice of getting into debt has become more and more easy, notwithstanding men have become more wary. Goldsmith, ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 276 - Volume 10, No. 276, October 6, 1827 • Various
... unhappy dinner at Martindale Castle (which was, he said, a crying of peace when there was no peace, and a dwelling in the tents of sin), he imputed his ejection from his living, with the destruction of some of his most pithy and highly prized volumes of divinity, with the loss of his cap, gown, and band, and a double hogshead of ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... us turn our attention to the left-hand corner. There we see that pithy soldier all in red. Rembrandt, with his intuitive knowledge of chiaroscuro, was not afraid of painting a figure all in red. He knew that the play of light and shade on the colour would help him out. Here part of the red is toned down by a beautiful ...
— Rembrandt • Josef Israels
... is primarily a grave, stately, scholarly mind, but all the deeper on that account in the lustre of his humorous displays. Addison, too, had somewhat of the poet in him, and was capable of tragedy as well as of neat satire and compact characterization. But if we looked for a pithy embodiment of the difference between Irving and Hawthorne, we might call the former a "polite writer," and the latter a profound poet: as, indeed, I have called him in this essay, though with no intent ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... fire." Still repeating the awful words, his voice broken to a terrified whisper, "His rebuke with the flames of fire!" And in particular moods, when the prophets, however sonorous, were inadequate to his need, my uncle would have recourse to his own pithy vocabulary for terms with which to anathematize himself; but these, of course, may not ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... acquaintance he has made, he says, "He is a great friend of Elsner's, which in my estimation means much." No doubt Chopin looked up with more respect and thought himself more indebted to Elsner than to Zywny; but that he had a good opinion of both his masters is evident from his pithy reply to the Viennese gentleman who told him that people were astonished at his having learned all he knew at Warsaw: "From Messrs. Zywny and Elsner even the greatest ass ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... oddity may not be directly evident to all, perhaps some of our readers will furnish us with a pithy translation ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 335 - Vol. 12, No. 335, October 11, 1828 • Various
... during this troublous year of 1913. In this year, too, South Africa was visited by a drought which for severity was pronounced to be unprecedented in the knowledge of all the old inhabitants. Remarks — some pithy, some ugly — were made upon the drought by Dutchmen. They all remembered how the God of their fathers used to send them nice soaking rains regularly each spring-time, and that it usually continued to nourish the plants and other of the country's vegetation throughout the summer, ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... be laid down that short sentences are preferable to long ones. The tendency of the best writers of the present day is towards short, snappy, pithy sentences which rivet the attention of the reader. They adopt as their motto multum in parvo (much in little) and endeavor to pack a great deal in small space. Of course the extreme of brevity is to ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... Espinosa urged the propriety, by every argument which prudence could suggest, of moderating his demands. His claims upon Cuzco, at least, were not to be shaken, and he declared himself ready to peril his life in maintaining them. The licentiate coolly replied by quoting the pithy Castilian proverb, El vencido vencido, y el vencidor perdido; "The vanquished vanquished, ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... dog-chains were exposed to it, and, in a few days, they had a definite sheen. A deal box, facing the wind, lost all its painted bands and in a fortnight was handsomely marked; the hard, knotty fibres being only slightly attacked, whilst the softer, pithy laminae were corroded to a depth of one-eighth of ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... every word of this. In his pithy way, speaking of the distinction between natural and artificial objects, he says himself that if you planted a wooden bed and the wood could still grow, it would grow up, not a bed, ...
— Progress and History • Various
... Abbot terminated the exercise by the Adjutorium nostrum (the Pater Noster is of more recent introduction). Monks who were absent substituted for the Scripture lesson which they had missed, the pithy extract from St. Peter, "Fratres; sobrii estote," which we now read. The whole company of monks and their abbot then proceeded to the chapel where each made his examination of conscience, and at a sign from the abbot, the monks, two by two, in a ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... of the Poets.—It is for the developing of the best moral and mental qualities in the lads that they are compelled to memorize long passages of the great poets of Hellas. Theoginis, with his pithy admonitions cast in semi-proverb form, the worldly wisdom of Hesiod, and of Phocylides are therefore duly flogged into every Attic schoolboy.[*] But the great text-book dwarfing all others, is Homer,—"the Bible of the Greeks," as later ages will call it. Even in the small ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... for the wages due to him, and without a word waved his hand towards the door. Remonstrance and entreaty, or the assurance that it was a first fault, were alike in vain; a stare, a shrug, and just possibly the pithy injunction, "Go!" was the utmost they ever elicited from the maitre d'hotel; and as their wages were high and always paid to the day, a practice by no means common in great households in those times, the cases of delinquency were few, and M. Boulederouloue's ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... till he came to THE POINT—which he thus approached:—"I now come, however, to considerations which induce me, without hesitation, humbly to advise your lordships to reverse this judgment." He was brief but pithy in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... said in his heart that there is no God;' but the fool hath not said in his heart that there is no sorrow,—pithy and most profound sentence; intimating the irrefragable claim that binds men to the Father. And when the chain tightens, the children are closer drawn together. But to your wish: I will remember it. And when my cousin returns, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... said the maid, giving pithy verbal expression to the ragged state of her nerves as she cut the stalks of the beautiful flowers which came daily without name or message. The dog's method of expressing himself was somewhat more violent; it consisted of the sudden seizure between his great teeth of ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... fool you must be," was the courteous and conciliatory reply to the countess. When the late Duke of York consulted him, he stood whistling with his hands in his pockets; and the duke said, "I suppose you know who I am." The uncourtly reply was, "Suppose I do, what of that?" His pithy advice was, "Cut off the supplies, as the Duke of Wellington did in his campaigns, and the enemy will leave the citadel." When he was consulted for lameness following disease or accidents, he seldom either listened to the patient or made any inquiries, but would walk about the room, imitating ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 493, June 11, 1831 • Various
... that the Chinians be altogether destitute of other artes. For, as touching morall philosophy, all those books are fraught with the precepts thereof, which, for their instructions sake, are alwayes conuersant in the hands of the foresayd students, wherein such graue and pithy sentences are set downe, that, in men void of the light of the Gospell, more can not be desired. [Sidenote: Naturall philosophy.] They haue books also that intreat of things and causes naturall, but herein it is to be supposed, that aswell their books as ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... began the wyttie discourse of his Euphues, whose works, surely in respect of his singular eloquence and brave composition of apt words and sentences, let the learned examine and make tryall thereof, through all the parts of Rethoricke, in fitte phrases, in pithy sentences, in galant tropes, in flowing speeche, in plaine sense, and surely in my judgment, I think he wyll yeelde him that verdict which Quintillian giveth of both the best orators Demosthenes and Tully, that from the one, nothing may be taken away, to the other nothing may be added[13]." After ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... thick as a lucifer match, is split into four strips. The workman then takes a strip in his left hand, and, with his thumb on the back and his forefinger on the edge, draws the strips up and down against the knife blade until the soft pithy parts are cut away, and what remains has become fine enough for the next process. The cases are made on pointed cylindrical pieces of wood almost a couple of feet long. A pin is stuck into the center of the end of the cylinder, and ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... taken as a whole, I know not any poetic epistles to be compared with them. They are just the letters in which one friend might unbosom himself to another without the least artifice or disguise. And the broad Doric is so pithy, so powerful, so aptly fitted to the thought, that not even Horace himself has surpassed it in "curious felicity." Often, when harvests were failing and the world going against him, he found his solace in pouring forth in rhyme his feelings to some trusted friend. As he says in one of ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... and at the weathercock on the top of the market house you look in there. A local fisherman was coming out, and in reply to the inevitable question as to the state of the river, he said, "Weel, she's awa' again." Pithy and characteristic, and full of information was this. It was a verdict—You may fish, but shall fish in vain this day. The Tweed ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... description of it, which will be given in due course), it may be well to say a few words upon the principles which have guided the writer in his treatment of the subject. These cannot be better expressed than in a very pithy sentence uttered by Professor Willis at the meeting of the Archaeological Institute at this very place in 1861. "In all investigations of this nature, I am of opinion that it is requisite to ascertain first whether there exist any contemporary documents ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... sufficiently recognise the truth of Walt Whitman's pithy saying, "I am not all contained between my hat and my boots," and forget the two-fold nature of the "I AM," that it is at once both the manifested and the unmanifested, the universal and the individual. By losing sight of this truth we surround ourselves with limitations; we see ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... be marking down something with his pen in that book, even when some of the most learned men, as Coleman and Selden, were delivering their long and learned orations, and all he was writing was for the most part his pithy ejaculations to God, writing these words; Da lucem, Domine; Da lucem! When these learned men had ended their oration, the Moderator proposed who should give an answer to their discourse; they all generally voted Mr Gillespie to be the person. He ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... Basilica, the Amphitheatre, which is in a perfect state of preservation, and more elliptical in form than any of those I have yet seen, and the School of Eloquence, where R** mounted the rostrum, and gave us an oration extempore, equally pithy, classical and comical. About sunset we got into the carriages, and ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... speeches. Congressman James G. Maguire spoke for those individual Democrats who believed in woman suffrage, among whom he was always a staunch advocate. Miss Anthony was cheered to the echo and it seemed as if the audience could not get enough of her bright, pithy remarks, as she ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... set up a great gingerbread-colored carriage, drawn by a pair of black Flanders mares with tails that swept the ground; and to commemorate the origin of his greatness he had for his crest a full-blown cabbage painted on the panels, with the pithy motto, ALLES KOPF, that is to say, ALL HEAD, meaning thereby that he had risen ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... implies a total wreck, with the loss of all hands. If a ship carries away any of her important spars, or, on entering her port, strikes heavily against a pier, whereby serious damage is occasioned, the accident is duly registered in this pithy chronicle of Lloyd's. Nevertheless, as we glance up and down the columns, it is no exaggeration to say, that two-thirds of the accidents recorded are of the most serious description. We are unable to say to what degree this register of Lloyd's ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... one, conceded to be useful. He has preached from the White House many doctrines; but among them he has left impressed on the American mind the one great truth of economic justice couched in the pithy and stinging phrase 'the square deal.' The task of making reform respectable in a commercialized world, and of giving the national a slogan in a phrase, is greater than the man who performed it ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... during the past week, and the event was now commemorated by a dirge in which the children's shrill treble was supported by the majority of the congregation. The sermon also took up the moral of life and death. It was short and pithy; perhaps it was familiar, and none the less useful for that. Mr. Forbes was not concerned to lead his people into new ways; he believed the old were better. Work and pray, fear God and keep His commandments, love your neighbor, and meddle not with those who are given to change,—these ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... hear nothing at a short distance than at a long one—sat 'Old Maxum', as he was familiarly called, his real patronymic remaining a mystery to most persons. A fine philological sense discerns in this cognomen an indication that the pauper patriarch had once been considered pithy and sententious in his speech; but now the weight of ninety-five years lay heavy on his tongue as well as in his ears, and he sat before the clergyman with protruded chin, and munching mouth, and eyes that seemed to look ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... kept up his habit of jotting down in his note-books and his correspondence all he saw and heard, Baillie's Letters and Journals (first properly edited by Mr. David Laing in 1842) are among the most graphic books of contemporary memoir to be found in any language. His faculty of narration in his pithy native Scotch is nothing short of genius. Whenever we have an account from Baillie of anything he saw or was present at, it is worth all other accounts put together for accuracy and vividness. So in his account of Stratford's trial; ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... imagination of him that hears, that he should have something else to do, than to think of words. The way of speaking that I love, is natural and plain, the same in writing as in speaking, and a sinewy and muscular way of expressing a man's self, short and pithy, not so elegant and artificial as prompt ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... quit Lechee till the following day, and pressed them strongly to remain with him for the day, which, however, not all his solicitations nor importunities could induce them to accede to. After some trifling conversation, and a long and pithy harangue from a Fellata, they took their leave of him and his people, and instantly made their way back to the water side, where they waited in the grass hut for the appearance of the canoe men, with whom the chief had promised to supply them. After a considerable ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... to the meeting with a pithy discourse on the sacredness of human life, the weaknesses and dangers of circumstantial evidence, and the rights of the accused wherever doubt arose. Then she plunged into the evidence, stripping off the superfluous and striving to confine herself ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... value is found chiefly in the pulp, and the fruit which has not a due proportion of pulp and flesh seems to be insipid and tasteless. Again, the division into many small cells is often connected with a large and pithy placenta and unevenness in maturity and coloring, which faults often more than overbalance any advantage from small cells and thick flesh. The size and character of the placenta ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... Captain Tugwell, in his pithy style, was wont to divide all human life into two distinctive tenses—the long-pipe time and the short-pipe time. The long-pipe time was of ease and leisure, comfort in the way of hot victuals and cool pots, the stretching of legs without strain of muscle, and ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... potters. There's been borrowing and speculation. The masters don't stick to one business as they used to do. I can tell that much. Half the valley may be 'playing' before two months are out." Parload delivered himself of this unusually long speech in his most pithy ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... cruisers—St. Paul, St. Louis, Harvard, and Yale—and the fast naval cruiser Minneapolis before the mouth of the harbor. The number of these ships shows the importance attached to the duty. It was necessary to allow largely for the chapter of accidents; for, to apply a pithy saying of the Chief of the Naval Bureau of Equipment,—"the only way to have coal enough is to have too much,"—the only way to assemble ships enough when things grow critical, is to send more than barely enough. All those that received their orders proceeded ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... have carefully examined these Meditations, and are fain to confess that we admire them very much. They are short, succinct, pithy, always to the point, ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... writings to the pampered palates of literary epicures, I might have availed myself of the obscurity that overshadows the infant years of our city, to introduce a thousand pleasing fictions. But I have scrupulously discarded many a pithy tale and marvelous adventure, whereby the drowsy ear of summer indolence might be enthralled; jealously maintaining that fidelity, gravity, and dignity which should ever distinguish the historian. "For a writer of this class," observes an elegant critic, "must sustain the character ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... only readers. Its curse in common use is an incredible left-handed wordiness; but in the hands of a man like Pratt it is succinct as Latin, compact of long rolling polysyllables and little and often pithy particles, and for beauty of sound a dream. Listen, I quote from Pratt - this is good Samoan, ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the average comedy, in which the wit of a single sentence of Chesterfield suffices to carry an act. His man-of-the-world philosophy is as old as the Proverbs of Solomon, but will always be fresh and true, and enjoyable at any age, thanks to his pithy expression, his unfailing common sense, his sparkling wit and charming humor. This latter gift shows in the seeming lapses from his rigid rule requiring absolute elegance of expression at all times, when an unexpected coarseness, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
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